- Another great day!
- 3 more first time professions of faith!
- One of our highest attendance days ever!
- Some cool stories of how people are applying this series to their lives and getting margin!
- Got to meet the 3 interns we’ll be working with this summer!
- Mike Smith was in the house!
- Lisa, my parents and myself were unexpectedly treated to a free lunch when a great couple from ECTV spotted us and had one of our “You Matter” cards delivered to the table! Problem was the waitress didn’t speak English very well (Japanese restaurant) so we didn’t fully understand what was happening until we went to pay and a waiter finally explained they had picked-up our bill!
- We convinced the theater to turn the AC on which made for a lot cooler Experience!
- Ok I think I’m out of statements that end with an exclamation point. Seriously!
- Ok seriously this time…it was a good day.
- Nothing too out of the ordinary except we again have equipment starting to feel the effects of the wear and tear of getting set-up and torn down each week.
- It was weird…last week I was looking forward to the message but didn’t feel good about it. Today was the opposite…I wasn’t feeling good about it going in but felt really good about it at the end,
- Guess you’ll have to listen for yourself.
- Essentially the message was about the practical steps to achieving financial margin. I think what I liked though were two specific illustrations that I used that when it finally dawned on people where I was going with them, I could audibly hear the “ah-ha” moments coming out of people’s mouths in a variety of ways.
- At the end I was able to share some of the awesome things we’ve been able to do in just 7 short months.
- Things like now 86 first time professions, over $20000 given in a variety of ways to help the community, incredible stories of lives being changed and transformed, etc.
- However, as I said, there are many other things that God has called us to do that we simply can’t yet because of finances.
- We’re not in trouble in any way, but I know God has so much more He wants us to do.
- So if you’d like to contribute financially, we’d greatly appreciate your support.
- I continue to be blown away by the incredible team God has assembled in such a short time and the things He’s allowed us to experience together as a church in only 7 short months…however…listen to me and listen carefully…
- The Best is Yet to Come!
Inside Today’s Experience
- First things first…Happy Mother’s Day!
- Especially to my mom…I love you!
- Mom is actually in Jamaica on vacation so this is the first time I’ve not been able to talk to her on a Mother’s Day.
- So thankful that her, dad, my sister and niece have been traveling each week to be a part of ExponentialChurch.tv.
- They were all away today though along with quite a few others so we were a bit short-staffed.
- In addition, I didn’t want to have any of the moms have to miss the Experience so that meant Chad, my wife Lisa, Tania and a couple of teens were in charge of nursery and toddlers.
- When Chad’s wife, Tammie, found out she decided maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea for her to be there as well.
- Thanks Tammie for all you do!
- Set-up was a bit weird today…for whatever reason, we made a couple of silly mistakes.
- One took quite awhile to figure out…we had to re-route some cables and then…
- …we realized we didn’t have the power turned on.
- Another one involved some things not getting plugged in…
- In any case, that’s why we build in plenty of margin to our morning so that we can catch these things, resolve them and still have plenty of time to relax before the actual Experience starts.
- As for the Experience itself, it was cool to be able to do some child dedications on Mother’s Day.
- Congrats to Lorraine Weaver and her twins, Shawn and Annette.
- The worship time was certainly emotional.
- The Krull family (parents, kids and grandkids) who all made the move with us to get the church started, unexpectedly lost Jan’s dad (Andy’s grandad) yesterday.
- Andy’s wife Gayle who is on the worship team did her best to hold it together as she lead “How He Loves”, but understandably was not able to.
- Thought it was a very authentic moment…as good as the team is, it’s just a good for people to see that the band is real people as well.
- Truthfully, I didn’t feel comfortable with this week’s message.
- I was gone for most of the week at our denomination’s annual regional conference, which meant my normal routine was disrupted.
- I went over the message twice as many times as usual trying to make up for it, but felt really unprepared.
- Oh me of little faith! Like always God was able to give me just the right words.
- Was it the best message ever…no…but it was what God wanted to people to hear.
- I love how even now we’re already hearing how much of a difference this series is making!
- Good news is we’ve still got 4 more weeks left in it so that means plenty more life-change!
- Don’t forget that everyone as a church this week will be reading through the book of James.
- Loved Chad’s idea of how to make our Mother’s Day gift a missional opportunity.
- Basically we gave all the ladies baby bottles filled with candy.
- Next week we’re asking them to bring the bottles back filled with coins or even cash.
- All the money will then be given to the local crisis pregnancy center to help a mom or mom’s who are at risk.
- Overall, a really good day…the momentum we tried to create from Easter and last week’s iPad give-away was sustained, mom’s were honored, babies were dedicated and most importantly God’s Word was proclaimed and transforming!
- After 3 consecutive weird weeks and lots of travel, I’m looking forward to something a bit more normal.
- Monday afternoon and night the staff will be doing some strategic planning for the remainder of 2011. Please keep us in prayer.
- Next Sunday we’ll continue the iLife series by looking at God’s app for handling money.
- If you have financial stress or know someone who does, you’re going to want to make sure you and they are with us.
Inside Today’s Experience
- The pic on this post is Chelsea leading our kids in worship today.
- So awesome to see the kids that excited about Jesus.
- I hated church as a kid so offering something for kids that is fun, relevant, but most importantly points them to Jesus is very important to me.
- So thankful we hired Chelsea…she’s doing an awesome job!
- It was funny…I left the main auditorium after giving the welcome and the band was doing 3 more songs. When I left the crowd was about normal size.
- When I came back I had to do a double take…where in the world did all these people come from.
- I saw my dad and said, “Wow late arriving crowd”.
- I’m not surprised though…late arriving for church seems to happen everywhere.
- Wonder if people who are chronically late for church would also be late if they had tickets to see their favorite band in concert or sports team in action?
- My guess would be no…which tells you something, doesn’t it?
- My friend and coach Vince Antonucci had a different take on this today in his blog.
- Think there’s probably a middle ground to be found. Teach people why showing up on time honors people and God (which coincidentally was a part of my message today) but show them grace when they’re not.
- Ok, now back to the beginning of the day.
- You know how you sometimes sleep on your arm and it “falls asleep”?
- Well I woke up today with my shoulder behind me and “asleep”. Never had that happen before…man did it hurt.
- Doesn’t help then to go into the theater and have all kinds of heavy things that need to be moved.
- Thankfully we have an awesome team who keeps getting better and better with getting set-up.
- Today we did full set-up, warm-up and a full run-through in 1 hour and 15 minutes. Wow…when you consider all the equipment and lighting we have to set-up, that’s amazing!
- I also loved that after our team meeting and prayer time was over a little boy (7-8 years old) came up to me and said, “You forgot to tell them the 3 things”.
- So cool that he’s heard me instruct the team enough that he picked up on important instructions I forgot to give.
- Even cooler than he had the boldness to confront me about it.
- Even better that when I got everyone’s attention again…Kendrick actually gave the instructions.
- Not sure why everyone applauded when he did it but they don’t for me. 🙂
- Nothing really out of the unusual as far as today’s Experience goes.
- Band did great as usual and I felt good about today’s message talking about how to have both someone who believes in you and someone you do the same for.
- Best part of the day was that 4 more people today prayed to ask for Jesus forgiveness and leadership in their lives!
- I love seeing that…I’m addicted to lives being changed.
- Don’t forget that our dinner for parent’s and those interested in knowing more about our children’s ministry is this Friday night at 7pm. It’s a FREE dinner so come on out and check it out. You can register here.
- Also don’t forget that dinners with me will be held February 8, 9, 15, 16, 18, 22 and 23. Online registration will begin soon, but if you want to get on the calendar before a particular date fills, then email me and we’ll get you registered.
- Have a great week…I know mine is going to be really busy…so if you don’t mind saying a quick prayer for me, I’d appreciate it!
Review of Preview Experience on 9/12/10
- Been awhile since I’ve been able to do an Inside Today’s Experience blog post and it shows since I’m not almost 36 hours late getting this posted.
- What a weekend…exciting and tiring all at the same time.
- My Dad and Andy traveled out to Troy, Michigan Thursday night into Friday morning, picked up a lot our equipment and then turned right around and drove home.
- Saturday morning everyone gathered at the theater at 7am to unpack and test equipment for the first time.
- We still have a lot of stuff on back order so we were improvising on some things but all in all it went well and we felt confident going into Sunday.
- Before I go further, let me throw in a couple of relevant points.
- Our team is amazing. They have been putting in dozens of hours each week and I’ve hardly heard any complaining at all. Let me say it again…they are amazing and surely God is going to reward them for all the hard work they’ve been doing.
- Other churches are just as amazing. So far over 30 churches now are helping support us in some way. I’ll do a blog post in the future to recognize them all and share some inspiring stories of what can happen when the capital “C” church truly cares about lost people and realizes we’re all on the same team. This past weekend and future weekends wouldn’t be possible without great leaders who are sacrificing time, money, equipment and people to help us.
- One example of the last point is that we went from no lights at all just 2 weeks ago, to two churches donating entire lighting rigs and others financially contributing so we could buy even more , which “just happened” to be on sale for 50% off when we went in to buy them).
- Problem was we couldn’t get everything to work together lighting wise on Saturday morning so Andy I worked at his house until 9pm in his garage and front yard setting up a fake stage.
- Oh the adventures he and I have had together over the past 17 years. Next to God and Lisa, I couldn’t ask for a better friend and partner to do ministry and life together with! And Gayle’s not so bad herself 🙂
- I slept like a baby and then we were all at the theaters again at 7am, but this time to do it for real.
- Everything went fairly smooth with set-up except we couldn’t get some of our signage assembled the right way and even though Andy and I had the lights working, we didn’t have time to write any light scenes so we went with a solid blue look the entire Experience.
- Not bad though…our goal was to by the end of the weekend be at about 80% efficiency and effectiveness…think we did at least that.
- In addition to our team we were joined by volunteers from 5 other churches. Thanks to everyone who came on a short-term missions trip to the deep, dark jungles of Harrisburg to help reach out.
- Again we have some bugs that needs to be worked out but I thought overall our lobby presentation and signage, our kids areas and main adult worship spaces looked amazing.
- As for the Preview itself, it’s sort of one of those catch-22’s. You want enough guests to show up so you can see if the systems we put in place work, but at the same time you don’t want so many people that with everything not being at 100% you make a negative first impression.
- So with all that said, our total attendance for the day including helpers and kids was 86 people!
- I just realized that for this Preview we actually had more people than the average church in America does (72) for one of their regular services.
- Wow God is good and the best is yet to come!
- If you’re interested in getting a taste of what happened yesterday, here is a link to a simple video I put together with some highlights of the Preview.
- In addition to the 86 people we also had some news media folks who showed up.
- Last week I did an interview with the Patriot Newspaper and they sent out one of their photographers to shoot some shots.
- I would expect the article to come out in the next week or two.
- Also ABC27 News sent a film crew out to take some footage and do an interview.
- Funny thing was we had already started the Experience when one of our team members informed me that they were there and wanted to do an interview but couldn’t wait around until the end.
- So I left during the worship set…did a quick interview and then got back just in time to deliver the message.
- The news clip has run a total of 3 different times and we’re appreciative of the nice feature they did on us. You can watch it here if you haven’t yet seen it.
- Bill and the band did an incredible job and every kid I talked to was excited about what Chelsea had to offer in the ECTV Kid’s Theater. Add in Chad running around making sure behind the scenes stuff was happening and our staff did a tremendous job…in fact I gave them all the day off so they could rest and recuperate after weeks on end of hard work. Great job guys…love partnering with you!
- We’re already getting a lot of positive feedback from the weekend and we can’t wait to do it again on September 26th…although it’s nice to have a week here to “breathe”.
- I preached about how none of us grow up wanting to be the guy who cleans port-o-pots or cleans up road kill yet many times the dreams we had for a life of significance gets shot down. The result is we get into survival mode instead of being the community and world-changers God has called us to be. When we occasionally do get a spark to do something great, is when the naysayers come out and start saying things like, “Well perhaps that will happen…I mean maybe you can do it”. These discouraging words cause us to retreat back into our safe, comfortable lives where our biggest goal is winning the rat race. So the big idea from yesterday was that “God’s promise is always bigger than my perhaps”.
- I truly believe that if Jesus could use 12 ordinary guys to change the world then He can take the people of ExponentialChurch.tv and use us to change Harrisburg and beyond.
- Partnering with other churches and ministries in the city to win it for Christ is not a very popular message as evidenced by the guy who refused to shake my hand on the way out the door.
- Here’s the sad part…I’d almost guarantee he is a part of another church and was there to check out the weird new church in town who doesn’t do things the way his church does. In other words in his mind, the right way. But instead of celebrating that more people will be in heaven one day because of our combined efforts, he instead made it very evident that he was offended. The reason this is so sad is what he doesn’t realize is that it’s attitudes like that actually push people further from Jesus.
- I post this for a reason…ExponentialChurch.tv is not doing church the right way or the only way…just a different way. We desire to be a church for people who don’t like church not just do things because “that’s the way they’ve always been done”.
- Sorry if that sounds like a bit of a rant, but as I said in yesterday’s message, “The church has been called to domination and we’ve become all about conversations about topics that really don’t matter”. Is it any wonder the church in America is on the decline and we are the laughingstock of the world as even they realize how stupid it is for Christians to argue over worship styles?
- Tearing everything down afterward went quicker than I anticipated which is a good thing because when we eventually go to two different Experience times on Sunday mornings it will force us to tear down in only 1/2 hour.
- Even though I was tired, I then went out to lunch with two future church planters who were in town to help and observe everything we were doing.
- Hopefully we showed them more good than bad.
- Great guys and they asked a lot of great questions at lunch.
- After that we hosted our good friends Bill and Nicole Mellott from West Virgina for a couple of hours at the house. They are another couple that we’ve done life deeply together with and we’re still praying that God would somehow make it possible for them to move up here as well.
- After that then we went over to Andy and Gayle’s for dinner with them and the Chute’s. Mmmm grilled chicken kabobs and I even treated myself to a Mellow Yellow which I haven’t had in years.
- It was a long day, but one that I’m extremely excited about and feel the hard work and effort of the entire team will pay-off big time as we move forward!
- Thanks for reading all this…if you’re just checking us out for the first time, please don’t hesitate to e-mail me if you have any questions. Gilbert@ExponentialChurch.tv